Data archives create huge challenges to enterprises. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA mandate enterprises proactively manage the end-to-end data life cycle from data creation to archive. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, also known as the “Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act” (in the Senate) and “Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act” (in the House) and commonly called Sarbanes-Oxley, Sarbox or SOX, is a United States federal law enacted on Jul. 30, 2002, as a reaction to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals including those affecting Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Today, there are certain data archive tools that define data storage management backup policies. They are coarse-grained and fixed rules, e.g., what is the storage pool target, what to do if file is in use, how long to keep backup versions and archive copies. These rules are pre-defined and cannot be customized. Current data archive solutions are not flexible enough to fulfill a variety of data archive requirements.
One of the primary methods to archive data is for a user to select, move and remove data manually. For instance, database administrators may issue SQL queries. (Structured Query Language is a database computer language designed for managing data in relational database management systems (RDBMS) or use generic database utilities to search and select against relational databases and save the result as files, and then send via FTP to another location. (File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network, such as the Internet.)) This method may be simple and doesn't create large, upfront cost, but it has disadvantages. Specifically, it creates high risk of archiving the wrong data or not archiving enough data and frequently leads to data integrity issues, so the manual archive method is of potential damage to an enterprise and even result in an enterprise disaster.
Other data archive technologies usually provide a configurable console and programmable tool for data archive. However, these products also have limitations:                These tools may have limited data source and location support. Most of these tools may only support specific relational databases (such as IBM® DB2®, Oracle, etc.), and just archive to tables or flat files. (DB2 is one of the families of relational database management system (RDBMS) software products within IBM's broader Information Management Software line. DB2 is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. The Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply Oracle) consists of a RDBMS produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. Oracle® is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.).        These tools may have limited data type support. Most of them only support common data types in relational database.        Some archive tools may just simply copy documents (files) just like a backup system, never consider business logic.        These tools may not be flexible enough to change archive rules.        None of the prior art systems use model-driven development (MDD) to model data archive specifications, then transform specifications into executable code.        
A rule-based approach has proven itself as an effective way to deal with the problems resulting from frequent changes businesses need to comply with. The approach has been leveraged at the generic data archive framework for data archive business rules definition, which makes the framework more flexible and adaptive to various requirements.
Therefore, there is a need to solve the problems associated with data archive technology as described above.